25 Years of the Shuttle

"Gene DiGennaro" wrote in message
oups.com...

I guessed I missed the Friday as well. My Mom and Dad let me stay home
for the next several launches too, so I guess that's where I got the
memory of missing class more than once.

Well don't know if I was on vacation or just playing hooky, but did watch
STS-3 from south of KSC (around Port Canaveral it looks like from the map.)

Still amazing. I'm somehow getting my family to a launch before they stop
flying.

Rusty wrote:


I remember seeing the Shuttle stack on the pad, with that white
external tank and the solid boosters on each side, and thinking how it
reminded me of the Taj Mahal.



I just thought it looked really odd; rockets are supposed to be
vertically, not horizontally, stacked.
I thought it would probably fall apart in midair.

Pat

I distinctly recall the day Columbia first flew.

Actually I remember the day it didn't fly also.

But the day it flew I stayed home from school until it made orbit.

After that I finally went to school. My teacher only asked one question,
"Well, did it lift off?" She already knew why I was several hours tardy.
:-)

Other people's thoughts?

the launch was on a Sunday, just exactly what school are we talking about,.....Sunday School?

--

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:45:39 -0500, Brian Thorn
wrote:

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 12:31:11 GMT, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:

But the day it flew I stayed home from school until it made orbit.

Er, on a Sunday?

After that I finally went to school. My teacher only asked one question,
"Well, did it lift off?" She already knew why I was several hours tardy.

Other people's thoughts?

I was on the NASA Causeway East for the launch. I'd been at KSC for
the scrub on Friday, April 10, too, but for some reason (reported to
be bootleg, or too many proper Vehicle Passes, but who knows) they put
us on SR-3 north of the VAB.

We were out at Dryden for the serious launch attempts. My husband was
in the control room because we were the AOA landing site, of course,
and I was watching on the in-house TV system. I think I was down in
CR1, with the VIPs, both times, now that I think about it. I might
have been in the pilot's office or in ops, though.

The JSC chase pilots were on onsite, of course, and their T-38s were
parked in a neat line on the "wrong" side of the ramp. I knew one of
them fairly well (we'd gone to high school together), so we'd visit
during all the waiting around. It was that funny, edgy waiting around
that's very unsettling. We were all waiting to react if something
went really wrong, after all.

That's what I remember most about the early program, all the waiting
around. Taking VIPs on hangar tours because they'd had to show up
hours and hours beforehand. Strolling up and down the flight line
looking helpful while 10,000 people were waiting for hours for
anything to happen.

I was out on the lakebed for the first landing, being a host. I'd
ridden out on a bus with Leonard Nimoy and John Denver (the whole VIP
operation for the first flight was run from a hotel in Lancaster, not
on base). There was a tent with refreshments and another tent with a
zillion white folding chairs, all plopped down on the lakebed out by
the compass rose.

Late that afternoon there was a big insider party in town, put on by
Rockwell (I think). You had to have a badge to get in, as I recall.
It was a real blowout. A lot of people had been running on adrenalin
and caffeine for a long time and they were ready to dial back a notch.
They came into the part euphoric with success and the liquor just
added to that euphoria.

The next day we were back out at work. There was data to analysis and
time histories to study; it was time to do all the engineering that
we'd been waiting so long to do.

Mary
--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote reports about it.
or